Tommy Pico, _Feed_ (poetry week #5)

TOMMY PICO AND I diverge in many respects. He is of the Kumeyaay nation; I am WASP. He is queer; I am straight. He dwells on the coasts; I inhabit the Great Plains. He is less that half my age. And yet we both like Bell's Two-Hearted Ale (see p. 30). So you never know.

And we also have both read Ariana Reines (see p. 51).

Feed is a book-length poem, a continuously unscrolling text of some 78 print pages. A lot of it seems to be set during a book tour, with the first half mainly on the west coast, ending up home in New York City. It's somewhat reminiscent of autofiction, but with all the dross of exposition and transition filtered out. I am going to compare it, though, to Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. 

As in that Heian court lady's masterpiece, we have some gossip, some confession, some pinpoint observation, some lyrical flights, some wisdom, and a few lists: of foods, of plants (with helpful guides to the pronunciation of their Latin names), and (naturally) a playlist, its seventeen songs (one used twice) presented over the course of the book, acting as a kind of spine.

Another unifying device is Fermi's Paradox (given how extensive the universe is, life must have developed on millions of planets, so why haven't they contacted us?), which Pico ingeniously applies to his dating life (given the billions of people in the world, there must be lots I would love to be with, so why do I never meet them?).

Feed is funny, touching, carbonated, hard to put down. The authorial voice is mercurial--smartass here, vulnerable there, sometimes prophetic. Really good book.